Elena Knows

by Claudia Piñeiro

She wonders why she says she has Parkinson’s when she doesn’t have it, it’s the last thing she wants to have. She suffers it, she curses it, but she doesn’t have it, having it implies a desire to keep something close, and she desires no such thing.

Elena knows what Rita would say if she could see her, she knows the lecture by heart but would like to hear it, would like to even hear her scolding and her insults and her anger. She’d choose Rita’s insults over her absence any day but she knows that it doesn’t matter what she’d choose because death has taken away her ability to choose.

I don’t know what it feels like to have an abortion but I do know what it feels like to be a mother even though you don’t want to be one, Elena. I know how it feels to have empty breasts, and the guilt when her tiny hand stretches for yours but you don’t want to touch her, you don’t want to rock her, or swaddle her, or warm her up or cuddle her, and the shame of not wanting to be a mother, because everyone, all the people who say they know what they’re talking about, insist that a mother should want to be a mother.

Never isn’t a word that applies to our species, there are so many things that we think we’d never do and yet, when put in the situation, we do them.

What test could life have placed in front of your daughter to make her do something she never thought she’d do? What could’ve made her decide she didn’t mind going to a church on a day like that? What could’ve been so terrible that she preferred to walk through the thunder and lightning she believed could kill her? Maybe she wanted the very thing she’d been so scared of before, for a bolt of lightning to split her in two. And when it didn’t happen, when she got there and realised it was all a lie, that she was soaking wet but still alive, she chose to climb the tower, tie the kind of knot she’d never thought she knew how to tie, put the rope around her neck, and hang herself.